


Broken

by little_librarian



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Angst, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-05
Updated: 2014-09-05
Packaged: 2018-02-16 06:09:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2258751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_librarian/pseuds/little_librarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As he trudges up the stairs, he wonders if Jenny had been broken before or after Angelus brought her up these step. Rupert Giles, post "Passion".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Broken

He spends the first day downstairs. He doesn’t want to walk up the stairs that Angelus carried Jenny’s body up, or view the room—his own bedroom—where she remained until the paramedics carried her out. Instead, he sits on the couch and stares resolutely at a bottle of scotch that he had originally planned to drink until he had no coherent thoughts left.

At the end of the day, he hasn’t moved from the couch. He falls asleep on the cushions, wearing tweed and suspenders, facing an unopened bottle of scotch.

He wakes up the next day and realizes that he needs to change his clothes: there are grooves in his skin from where the suspenders pressed too hard, and his shirt and pants have deep creases in them.

As he trudges up the stairs to change, he wonders if Jenny had been broken before or after Angelus brought her up these steps.

His morbid thoughts follow him to his room, clamping around his mind tighter than a steel trap. He hates that Angelus has this kind of power over him, that the vampire knows how to break him without touching him.

He enters his room, noticing that even though the petals have been cleared off the bed, they still litter the floor. This is what breaks him. He lets out a roar—the first sound he’s made since the police left—and sweeps his hands across the nearest flat surface. An expensive first edition novel goes flying into the wall and shards of glass twinkle at him from the carpet, but he doesn’t care. He changes his clothes, still breathing heavily with rage and grief while he buttons up his shirt, and goes back downstairs.

The next day he manages to spend enough time in the bedroom to clean up the mess before anguish sends him back to the couch. After that, he replaces the bedclothes with new, sterile linens and sends the old ones to the dump. Time begins to clot his still-bleeding wound, but he still can’t sleep in his bed. He spends his nights on the couch, accumulating sore muscles and cramps in his neck, but that’s okay. He can deal with that kind of pain.

He manages to spend two weeks sleeping in his bed before Angelus gets ahold of Acathla. Buffy goes missing, and he grows too weary to make it up the stairs at night and goes back to the couch.


End file.
